To Paradise

In the daytime, I sometimes speak aloud to Nathaniel. Out of respect, I rarely discuss work, for that would upset him too much. Instead, I ask him about Charlie. After that first incident with those boys, I had told her about sex, and sexual threats, in a much more complete way than I had told her before. “Do you have any questions?” I had asked her, and after a silence, she had shaken her head. “No,” she’d said. She still doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, and while I sometimes mourn for her, I envy her, too: To live a life without desire (not to mention imagination) would once have been something to pity, but now it might ensure her survival—or at least increase her chances. Yet her distaste has not stopped her from wandering off again, and after the second incident, I sat down with her again. “Little cat,” I began, and then I didn’t know what else to say. How could I tell her that those boys weren’t attracted to her, that they saw her only as something to use and toss aside? I couldn’t, I couldn’t—I felt traitorous even thinking the words. In those moments, I wished that someone felt lust for her, that even if that lust was muddied with cruelty, it would at least be passion, or a form of it—it would mean that someone saw her as lovely and special and desirable; it would mean that someone might one day love her as deeply as I do, but differently, too.

More and more frequently these days, I think about how, of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured. We kept track of these statistics; we wrote them all down. But then there were the other divisions, the kind that didn’t appear to warrant recording: The people who lived with other people, and the people who lived alone. The people who had money, and the people who didn’t. The people who had connections, and the people who didn’t. The people who had somewhere else to go, and the people who didn’t.

In the end, it hadn’t made as much of a difference as we thought it would. The rich died anyway, maybe more slowly than they should have; some of the poor survived. After the first round of the virus had whipped through the city, scooping up all the easiest prey—the indigent and the infirm and the young—it had returned for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until it was only the luckiest who remained. And yet no one was truly lucky: Is Charlie’s life lucky? Perhaps it is—she is here, after all, she can talk and walk and learn, she is able-bodied and lucid, she is loved and, I know, capable of loving. But she is not who she might have been, because none of us are—the illness took something from all of us, and so our definition of luck is a matter of relativity, as luck always is, its parameters designated by others. The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance. It revealed that kindness does not beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is—it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive. I sometimes sense a faint mutual embarrassment among those of us who lived—who had sought to deprive someone else, maybe even someone else we knew, or a relative of someone we knew, of medication or hospitalization or food if it meant we could save ourselves? Who had reported someone they knew, perhaps even liked—a neighbor, an acquaintance, a colleague—to the Health Ministry, and who had turned up the volume on their headphones to muffle the sounds of them begging for help as they were led away to the waiting van, shouting all the while that someone had been misinformed, that the rash that had spread across their daughter’s arm was only eczema, that the sore on their son’s forehead was only a pimple?

And now the illness is under control, and we are back to considering the incidentals of life once more: whether we might be able to find chicken rather than tofu at the grocery; or whether our children might be admitted into this college versus that one; or whether we might be lucky in this year’s housing lottery, and move from Zone Seventeen to Zone Eight, or Zone Eight to Zone Fourteen.